


Patience

by A_Almond



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Other, Patch 5.0: Shadowbringers Spoilers, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 19:10:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19910749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Almond/pseuds/A_Almond
Summary: On his shoulders rests the greatest burden of all. The parallels really are uncanny.





	Patience

**Author's Note:**

> I'm polishing rust off of myself with my writing. Figured a little thought-musing would help with that. This is for Pi, who likes the Crystal Exarch best of all. <3

He was not supposed to awaken to the end of the world, but that was what the doors of the Tower had opened to just the same. Brimstone. Fire. Destruction. Death.

Black Rose, they’d called it, and the bodies it left behind were hauntingly peaceful. He’d expected them to look like they had struggled; like they’d fought until their last, but… there was none of that. There was not a mark on any of them. Not on the Archons, nor the world’s greatest hero. Just still, deceptively peaceful, with glassy open eyes that stared right through his soul.

It was a vision that would be burnt into his nightmares until he died and he had not even seen it directly.

No, mercy had not seen fit to grant him the closure in goodbye. Instead, he’d been awoken to a calamity far greater than any seen so far: to more bodies than graves could be dug, and more yet still coming. The eighth and the worst by far.

How surreal to know that the cause of all of the destruction was not darkness, but light?

  
He’d not known what to expect, coming to the First with the Tower. It was not an exact science, but instead the last desperate attempt of heroes yet to come, hoping to correct the future by altering the past. There were no books or stories told of the other worlds. It was blind hope, a shot in the dark that proved fruitful.   
  
When he and the Tower arrived, amidst the wash of light, it seared his eyes and it seared his skin. Something in the process had warped him, made him one with the tower, and from it he drew strength - strength enough that he could perform great feats, including the ability to erect a barrier around it that could keep out any and all intruders. It was enough to draw in a few outcasts looking for succor, and those first outcasts formed the beginnings of what would go on to become a city unlike any other.   
  
They called it the Crystarium.   
  
It was startling, the parallels. The view from inside the tower afforded him the luxury of seeing over great distances, and … the First was a mirror of its Source counterpart in so many different and unexpected ways. Was Eulmore not unlike Limsa Lominsa in geography? Did the territory of Amh Araeng not evoke imagery of Thanalan?   
  
Would it be enough?    
  
It was a trial of endurance, this task. He would see it through, because he was the only one who could, but every day became harder than the next; every hour more isolating than the one before it, and at times he found himself… homesick. Familiar and yet alien. There were times when he heard stories about the Warriors of Light, disgraced and fallen, and it took everything he had not to lose his temper.    
  
After everything they gave, after everything they did.   
  
His solace came in his books. He’d amassed every story, every legend, to serve as inspiration and hope. Time made the Crystarium grow, the people working harder every day to see their world made into a better, safer place for future generations, and he saw in them the same fire he’d left behind. But there was one key element missing to the puzzle, one piece left to make it whole.   
  
The piece that would bring equilibrium to the light; the piece that would temper it and bring the night back to the world. How he longed to tell them the stories, to fill them with the same hope as he felt - and yet, it was selfish, too. His goals in saving this world were not for this world at all, but for the home he’d left behind.    
  
Would they reject his hero, too, as they had rejected their own? Could they? The parallels were uncanny.    
  
He had to true. He had to have hope. The future had to be unwritten. His role in that tale was unimportant, in the face of the magnitude of his task. He had to hope, because on his shoulders lay the future of thousands. It, like the hellish vision that flashed behind his eyes every time he closed them, would abate only when this world was saved. It spelled his end, he knew it would, but there were things worth fighting for.   
  
He need only be patient for a little while longer. Legends took time to unfold. 


End file.
